I apologize profusely in advance, as I know exceedingly little about Linux. I am trying to get my friend's laptop working which came with Linux and has recently stopped booting. I know a bit, and I am extremely computer literate and so I ought to be easy to deal with but I will need things spelled out a bit more than perhaps most...

The laptop is booting out of grub. It shows the splash screen, and then when the bar has finished moving to the right, an ASCII style (like the old MS-DOS shell) "window" appears that says "Cannot load X Server... due tosome internal error." It does not provide anything else. I can play around with the grub boot options to try to boot in the failsafe configuration. When I do that, I see a lot of error messages having to do with the computer being unable to write and the file system being read-only. The system then asks for a login, and after entering it, I am given the message "error in service module."

UPDATE:

I have seemed to (at least temporarily?) fixed the "error in service module problem" by commenting out the last 3 lines of the file /etc/pam.d/login

That's as far as I can get there. If I add the "single" option to the grub menu, I can get to the linux prompt, and i see the line "fsck succeeded. Mounting root device read-write." However, at the last line it says, "killproc: Can not handle pid file /var/run/blogd.pid 'gCZZp'

UPDATE:

When I log in as root (after having fixed the "error in service module" problem as described above), I attempted to "mount -o remount", but I get the message: mount: block device /dev/sda2 is write-protected, mounting read-only
That's about where I am at. Any idea?

01-02-2009

gogalthorp

/dev/sda2 refers to the second partition on the first drive.

It might help to see what the drive partitioning is.

as root type

fdisk -l ( the is a lower case L)

This will list the disk information.

also
mount
will list the mount info

There seems to be something wrong with the second partition and it is being mounted read only this would normally be the root (/) partition. There is also normally a small swap and a home (/home) partition assuming it is a standard install.

You may need to get a bootable CD so you can repair/edit the root. I suggest gparted or if you have it the original install disk. 10.0 is getting old and it may be hard to find a download.

You will find (and be able to change as root) the way grub is mounting the system in a file

/boot/grub/menu.lst

Also if you press esc during the boot splash you will be able to see any other errors that may be occurring. You could have file system corruption or even a bad disk.

Use ls or dir to list the directories cd to change. not sure what editors were installed in 10.0 but try joe or nano there is almost always vi.

01-02-2009

lazerlike42

I finally figured it out... after messing around with the boot options a bunch of times I happened to get it so as that I could see the reason it was making everything read-only. It said:

Quote:

fsck.ext3 /dev/sda2 failed (status 0x4). Run manually!

fsck failed. Mounting root device read-only.
Mounting root /dev/sda2

So I got did fsck /dev/sda2 and let it make about 10-15 repairs. That's great, but to follow up, if anyone can give me some info on.... basically, if someone can tell me why this might have happened or a way to prevent it from happening again so that it doesn't happen when there isn't anyone around who can fix it, that would be great. It's a computer and stuff happens I understand that, but is it going to mount as read-only whenever the file system gets off a bit (as opposed to, for example, an old DOS computer where something like that would more or less not show up to the average user)?

Also, those 3 lines I commented out: are they supposed to stay that way, or go back, or what? What are they for, in other words... are they bad lines that just appeared in the file somehow :p, or will the computer not do something correctly with them commented out? Thanks!

01-02-2009

gogalthorp

It can be caused by several things. Power off without a proper shutdown while OS is writing. Bad or weak sectors on the disk. In the case of a laptop bouncing/dropping the machine while running. Also running the battery completely down may cause a problem, because things can become unstable at the edges.

I'd recommend looking in the lost&found directory. It will contain files and fragments that could not be stitched back together. Also recommend that you do a repair from the install disk if available.

I'd uncomment those lines. The problem was probably the read only status of the disk.

If it happens again I'd do a serious check on the Hardware/battery. Run a good low level scan utility on the disk. I use Spinrite but it is not a free program. You should be able to get one from the disk manufacturers site.

The average user will not be able to fix this on their own. Remember the Windows solution is to reinstall the OS. That could apply here also.